International CZO Planning Committee

The International Critical Zone Observatory Planning Committee is an ad hoc working group assembled to advance Critical Zone research, outreach and education initiatives focused on societally relevant issues of environmental sustainability. The committee is comprised of representatives from formally funded CZO networks in the United States, Germany, and France, and the joint United Kingdom/China network. We welcome other CZ science networks to engage with us.

Dr. Steven Banwart is the Principal Investigator of the NERC Strategic International Critical Zone Observatory Program and the program’s Peri-Urban Agriculture CZO in China. Steve studies reactive processes in soil and groundwater and his achievements include combining laboratory experimentation, theoretical mathematical modeling, and data from field studies in order to describe water flow and transport and mechanisms of chemical transformations.

Dr. Susan Brantley is the Principal Investigator of the Susquehanna Shale Hills CZO of the U.S. CZO program, Director of the Earth and Environmental Systems Institute at The Pennsylvania State University and a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. Sue investigates chemical, biological, and physical processes associated with the circulation of aqueous fluids in shallow hydrogeologic settings. Her recent work has focused on the effect of microbial life on mineral reactivity, and measuring and modeling how rock turns into regolith.

Dr. Liu Congqiang is Vice President of the National Natural Science Foundation of China. He has been an advocate for CZ science and research through the establishment of international cooperative networks in China. His research areas include Earth surface geochemical processes and their eco-environment effects, as well as fundamental and applied geochemical research of trace elements and isotopes.

Dr. Jérôme Gaillardet is the coordinator of the French Network of Critical Zone Observatories (OZCAR) and the French Network of drainage basins (RBV network). He is also the principal investigator of the Innovative equipment for the Critical Zone project (CRITEX) aimed at developing innovative geochemical and geophysical tracers for probing the CZ. His research interests include the geochemistry of sediments transported by rivers and produced by chemical weathering in soils.

Dr. Harry Vereecken is coordinator of TERENO, the network of environmental observatories in Germany and Institute Director at the Jülich Institute of Bio- and Geosciences. Harry works in the experimental and theoretical analysis of reactive solute transport in soils and aquifers, including the development of geophysical measurement techniques for noninvasive detection of solute transport using electrical and magnetic methods.

Dr. Tim White is the U.S. CZO National Office coordinator, and Principal Investigator of the CZO Science Across Virtual Institutes (SAVI) project that aims to progress CZ science internationally. Tim is a classically trained field sedimentary geologist with a strong record of publication in stratigraphy and paleoclimatology, and more recently in studies of the Critical Zone.